In most shops, every time someone buys something they’ll leave with a bag containing their purchase.
If the product is a gift for someone else, the chances are that it will have been selected as much for the way it looks as for what it does. And if it’s contained within good-looking packaging you’ve done at least half of the gift-wrap job for the shopper and the recipient will also be aware of where a product came from.
Bags, packaging and product boxes are advertising which goes straight to people’s homes with your brand being paraded in front of many eyes on its way there. On this basis, it’s hard to understand why any retailer wouldn’t spend at least a little of its budget on offering something more than the most basic covering for its products.
Yet there are still a significant percentage of retailers who overlook what would seem to be an easy win and the reason usually given is cost. But engaging packaging, bags and associated advertising can be created inexpensively, helping to bind your customers more closely to your store and giving them a reason to identify with it.
Opportunities for everyone
At the top end of the market, London design consultancy The Nest worked with Harrods to produce a series of bags for a British promotion the store was holding. This may sound expensive, but was in fact the cheapest part of the promotion, according to director Freddie Baveystock. He makes the point that designing a bespoke print for bags that will be handed out every day or for one-off events such as the one at Harrods is simple, but it has to be viewed as part of a wider, integrated marketing push by a retailer.
In practice, at Harrods this meant that bags, windows, in-store signage and advertising (even on the sides of buses) all carried the same image. The bags had to be consistent with the rest of what was being done and also be instantly recognisable as part of a Harrods promotion. Baveystock says that the intention was to give the promotion ‘a bit of pizzazz. We needed a take-off from British colours, so instead of red, white and blue, we did pink, white and blue. It had to be recognisable and you had to get it straight away. It was about being classic, but with a twist.’
At the rather more mundane end of the design spectrum, The Nest worked with electrical chain Currys to design a Christmas carrier bag that the retailer ‘could own,’ as Baveystock puts it.
‘The first thing was that it had to be red, because those are the Currys colours,’ he says. Like the Harrods bags, it also had to fit comfortably with what the retailer was doing in-store, in order that the message could be spread by shoppers carrying bags on the streets. The final design was in fact very straightforward but as Baveystock notes: ‘Given how much goes on in the high street at that time of year, there’s a certain amount of logic to keeping things simple.’
Carrier bags and product boxes are an appealingly uncomplicated way of carrying your message beyond the shop. There is also the bonus that if the bag design you have created is any good, shoppers may actually choose to use them to carry other things in, continuing to promote your store long after the original purchase has largely been forgotten.